Southeast Asian commercial policy: outward-looking regional integration

The ten Southeast Asian economies have had highly diverse experiences with global and regional economic integration. During the colonial era they were more or less connected to the global economy through the metropolitan powers, sometimes on a preferential/discriminatory basis. In the early post-colonial era, only Singapore,Malaysia and Thailand remained “always open”, in the sense defined by Sachs-Warner, and also in Myint’s (1972) typology of outward-looking economies. Indonesia and Burma deliberately chose to disengage from the global economy, while the Philippines adopted a comprehensive import-substituting industrialization strategy. The three Indochinese economies were increasingly engulfed in conflict, and then isolated from the west and from global markets for more than a decade from 1975.